January 21, 2006

don't let the door hit your huge butt on the way out, vhs

so everyone is buying dvd recorders, and this is a good thing, but i'm sorry to report that they aren't buying them fast enough.

insipidmuckywater's brilliantly executed runs of genesis games i fondly remember almost met a cruel fate among the hundreds of interlocking parts that make up the guts of his vcr: witness the horror (DivX, 5.0 MB)!

this was after setting up everything so it was like the last time i encountered something like this. my guess is that neither of the tbcs could do much about it, because the image was rolling with a lower frequency than 60 hz - probably something more like 10 or 20 hz, and probably not constant.

luckily, an amazing virtualdub filter was all that was required to restore the video to an acceptable level of watchability (DivX, 6.2 MB). i used rather heavy-duty settings with the filter, turning everything up to the most cpu-intensive levels, meaning that these runs took an order of magnitude longer to process than they should have. however, given how short they are, i barely felt it.

anyone care to place a bet on whether vhs will nearly destroy someone else's runs before it dies a death that's more than fifteen years overdue?

Posted by njahnke at January 21, 2006 8:53 PM

Comments

Ack! My eyes! What the hell happened to that run?

Posted by: Forgotten One at January 22, 2006 1:09 PM

you tell me ... can only assume based on limited stuff i've heard about vhs mechanical vs electric failure that the "head was out of alignment", so i guess warped somehow or not rotating at a constant speed. actually, if i could show that the rolling was constant, then the head was probably just moving at the wrong speed, but i didn't bother to take the time when the deshaker did the work for me.